The Orangeman, Second Edition

The Life and Times of Ogle Gowan

Don Akenson, Donald Akenson

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228013693
• Print ISBN:
  9780228011804
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to Confederation, central Canada was awash with migrants from the British Isles and their cultural values. The raw prejudice that they brought with them – against the French, the Catholics, and even Yanks and Europeans – bound together the eventual political majority in Ontario. The Orangeman uses the life of Ogle Gowan, an Irish Protestant upstart from County Wexford who turned central Canada Orange, to explore these forces.

Gowan was ambitious, malicious, and mendacious, but by the time of Confederation the Orange Order was the largest alliance of men in the country – the foundation of the coalition of conservative Protestants that sculpted Canadian politics in the century that followed. Don Akenson uses his skills as a historian and a novelist in respecting the historical record. The Orangeman is a lively and entertaining fictional biography, and in Akenson's telling Gowan crosses swords with William Lyon Mackenzie and goes pub-crawling with the young John A. Macdonald.

One never knows everything about a historical person or event; sometimes the right thing to do is to speculate sensibly and, if possible, have a little fun along the way. Akenson shows us Canadian loyalism, constitutionalism, and deference to state authority on one side of the coin, and on the flip side, the successful attempt by one group of Canadians to do down the other. This is real history, real life: as yesterday, so today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• BOOK ONE Old World Inheritance
• 1 Rumours of War, 1798
• 2 The Great Rising, 1798
• 3 Learning the Language of Life, 1803–23
• 4 Folds in Fortune, 1823–24
• 5 Trials of a Young Married Man, 1824–26
• 6 Family Pride, 1826–29
• BOOK TWO Mining a New Land
• 7 A Very Fast Start, 1829–30
• 8 Becoming an Immigrant Leader, 1831–33
• 9 A Real Winner, 1833–35
• 10 Local Hero, 1835–36
• 11 Loyalism Incarnate, 1836–38
• BOOK THREE Just Rewards
• 12 The Brass Ring, 1838–41
• 13 A Certain Bluff Humanity, 1841–44
• 14 A Fine Chance, 1844–48
• 15 The Black Flag, 1848–52
• 16 Big City, 1852–56
• 17 Recessional, 1856–76
• EPILOGUE The Gowan Legacy
• A Note on Sources